Postby Mothra » Fri Feb 01, 2019 8:52 pm
Season 1 spoilers.
Every time we get a scene featuring Voq, it’s fun to look back on his character arc and bask in how exquisitely he has fucked up every single thing he’s ever been involved in.
Guy was born an albino, which forced him to grow up enduring racist mockery from his own people and his own house, which cast him out. All the way into his adult life, no other house would have him. He eventually falls in with a traditionalist cult lead by T’Kuvma, whose whole thing is that you should keep Klingon identity pure. Already, why would this jag value anything Klingon if it’s done nothing but unfairly fuck him his entire life?
T’Kuvma’s dad’s 200-year-old spaceship goes toe-to-toe with six state-of-the-art Fed spaceships and wins, but, two humans beam over and successfully murder T’Kuvma. They are essentially unopposed by Voq, his right-hand man. With T’Kuvma dead, the various clans briefly turn to Voq for leadership, but his ship is all fucked up with no power and dwindling food. The other clans look elsewhere. T’Kuvma is now dead, his ship is disabled and his house irrelevant.
Voq’s first act as leader is to tell his people to eat human corpses to survive, and to bar his people from taking the Shenzhou’s warp engine, because it was the ship that bested him and killed his leader. His people are literally going to die because he got his ass kicked so bad. This abandoned, derelict hunk of junk Federation ship is going to fully kill him and his crew by continuing to drift lifelessly through the void.
A few months later, Kol shows up, convinces Voq to go get the warp drive from the Shenzhou (which he now agrees to???), and then effortlessly takes control of Voq’s ship and crew and strands him on the fed ship to die. L’Rell convinces him to agree to an utterly insane plan to defeat specifically the Federation, and not the rival house that just took everything T’Kuvma had ever built.
Voq uses L’Rell’s resources and plan to undergo a ludicrously horrific, painful, vastly overcomplicated procedure that transplants his organs into the corpse of a human and leaves his mind shattered. No clear plan is ever revealed - Discovery wasn’t a threat at that point in the war, nor was the original ship that they both might want revenge on a threat. It’s never stated what Voq was actually supposed to do.
L’Rell then puts Voq into a prison on a ship she apparently owns and commands, then captures but does not kill Lorca (CAPTAIN OF THE MOST POWERFUL SHIP IN THE FEDERATION), where Voq meets Lorca, kills like five fellow Klingons in his escape, tries to shoot L’Rell’s in the head and misses by an inch, scarring her face, then returning to Discovery to faithfully support Discovery in its war efforts for months to come. Soon, they defeat and capture L’Rell. Want to also point out that L’Rell no longer has her scars for some reason, as of season 2.
Finally, in the mirror universe, Voq managed to break through after he met his mirror universe counterpart, who he hated to the point of trying to kill because he was not racist like the children who mocked him in his youth. Voq randomly kills the ship doctor, immediately revealing himself. Wracked with guilt from his human side, he turns himself in to Burnham, who then makes L’Rell perform a procedure that destroys Voq and makes Ash the dominant personality.
His mission having fully failed, Ash goes with L’Rell to the homeworld, where he proceeds to be a massive liability to L’Rell, to the point where he must fake his own death to prevent her from losing her position of power. He now works for the leader of the terran empire, who had personally committed genocide upon his people in her universe.
Didn’t exactly knock this one out of the park, Voq.